Resist the Urge to Build a Great Platform

Building a new platform? Don't make it great. Make it useful.

Platform teams want to give their customers everything they want. And they want to do it right now. We can't blame them, but we need to help them avoid this trap. Building a platform with missing features is actually the best path for new platform teams. Here's why.

Platforms Are Disruptive

Platforms are inherently disruptive products; they are designed to replace or abstract away larger, more complex platforms and processes. While this is exciting and exactly what platform teams want to get in on, the long list of features that exist in other platforms can quickly cause a log jam of promises in a never-releasing product. Platform teams quickly create lofty expectations, often of themselves, that v1.0 will have "everything" and end up aiming for something too ambitious, too quickly.

As new platform teams learning what it means to be a product team, they need to have a better understanding of how their new product is different than the platforms they may have been supporting previously. It's important for us to highlight the platform's differentiators so there isn't any mistaking the value it brings. This gives our new platform customers a reason to use its features. It makes a lot of sense when we think about how products with fewer features and less polish gain market share from arguably much “better” or more widely adopted products.

The Platform May Be Worse, But That's Okay

It isn’t that the platforms we’re building need to be “bad”, they just won’t launch with the same features and reach of the platforms they look to replace over a longer timeline.?New products succeed easier when they differ from other products. Disruptive products capture customers and market share by being faster, easier, and simpler to adopt and our new platforms should follow suit.

Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. ... Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. - Christensen, Clayton M., The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

I believe that understanding the lifecycle of new product development is critical to the success of enterprise platform teams and the platforms they are building. This means we also shouldn't be trying to be all things to all potential customers. The platform will grow if trust is built.

We see this as a fundamental idea within Team Topologies with how platform teams should begin with the "Thinnest Viable Platform" (TVP).

This TVP could be just a wiki page if that's all you need for your platform. - Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - co-authors of the book Team Topologies

In this case we're only looking to build the minimum usable feature to help development teams. This really may be the fine, but in most large enterprises, platform teams provide more and more services as their product matures. In either case one feature may be enough to get started show how the platform provides real value.

I think we need to concentrate on understanding what is missing with the platforms that exist today and go after each customer by giving them one thing that they didn't have before. Make it compelling but simple, useful but easy to integrate, and something that gives your team some early wins to keep the interest and excitement with the platform moving forward. It doesn't need to be great. It needs to be useful.